


pessima means the very worst

by peaksykid



Category: BeamNG.drive (Video Game), McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Bad Ending, Gen, also pessima really is latin for very bad, its boystos, thats what it is its boystos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-22 17:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11384619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid
Summary: The end-center-beginning of the universe works in strange ways. Nick and Griffin find themselves seeing their past adventures in a whole new light.Note: likely never going to touch this again because of, well, you know. and i doubt people will ever look at it again. because of, well, you know. so its just gonna remain unfinished. sorry.not gonna delete it bc i did like my writing style in it so im keeping it up i guess but dont expect it to be updated





	1. 1.

The shock wore off quickly. Once he realized Nick was gone, it took approximately 43 seconds for the panic to set in.

 

Outside the windows, colors whirled upward and dissipated, leaving behind a void of grey. The ever-present streaks of light from before had increased their pace and clung to the battered car like condensation on a glass. And Griffin clung to the side of the seat, utterly afraid.

 

He was alone.

 

He didn’t dare look outside the car to see if the OVO and the B—the thing, if they were still behind him. Nothing mattered to him in those moments of panic other than what had just happened. Nick was gone. He was alone. Ohhhhhgod. He could feel his breath rising in his chest faster than it should, faster than he thought possible—although here, as they’d said before, there wasn’t really time in the traditional sense, so maybe he really was breathing faster than normally possible—no, he couldnt even focus on thoughts like that now—it was all going too fast—

 

There were tears in Griffin’s eyes now. When he raised his hand to shield his gaze from one of the streaking bolts of light, he saw his whole arm was shaking. Startled, he curled up into himself on the seat, wishing he could disappear. 

 

He wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that—after all, time wasn’t real—but after a while he could feel his breath beginning to return to him. He tried to breathe deep and focus, to limited success; he locked eyes on a dial on the console of the car and stared at it until he could compose himself a little bit further.

 

He hadn’t realized how terrifying this place was until he was forced to confront it alone. It was—bad. Very bad. Hell, isn’t that what “Pessima” meant, anyway? He’d had a friend in college who’d taken Latin. “Theeeeeee worst,” he said out loud, with an odd strangled nervous laugh. He was locked in a beat up car at the bottom—or was it the top? or the center?—of a never ending vortex, with no way to contact anyone in the outside world. And as far as he knew, there very well could be multiple beings of unimaginably horrific cosmic power surrounding him, waiting to fall upon him and destroy him utterly.

 

Either that, or he was completely alone. He wasn’t sure which option he preferred.

 

What really made the difference between all the other times (when it wasn’t scary) and now (when it was) was the fact that Nick wasn’t there. That was the worst part. Nick, who had always had control of the situation before. Nick, who in any other situation could’ve just called up some commands on his wrist device and made this whole mess go away, or summoned up an item to save them, or just logged the two of them out of the world. It had been okay before, because they had been sure they had been in control of the whole thing. But they had been wrong.

 

It was funny, in a fucked up way, when he thought about it. Like a dramatic movie trailer. “In a world, where they thought they were in control…” Griffin muttered to himself in a puffed-up action film announcer voice, but trailed off. He just didn’t have the energy for those kind of jokes now. And if Griffin didn’t feel like making jokes, well, that was saying something.

 

The burning inner feeling of the panic attack from earlier was gone. It had been replaced by a dullness, a settling deep in his chest. He was beginning to realize the implications of the situation.

 

Eternity, huh. Eternity was a long-ass time. Especially without Nick.

 

He stared out the front window for a while, he wasn’t sure how long, line of sight falling into the swirling greyness streaked with occasional color. In any other situation it might’ve been pleasantly relaxing, but not here. Now, Griffin just felt heavy. Heavy like when they used to turn the gravity up and crumple vehicles to the ground, heavy like things that fall from impossible heights and crash into pieces. It was as if he could sink out of the car and into the abyss. Maybe he’d sleep. Maybe that’d help.

 

The grey glow of the void around him faded as Griffin closed his eyes to rest.

 

\--

 

When he awoke, still drowsy, the grey outside had turned noticeably more...blue. That was the first thing Griffin noticed, the color. The second was that the car appeared to have been repaired while he slept--reloaded, or something of the like. The third thing he noticed was that yes, he was still here, in the Pessima, at the core of the universe, without a single living soul for company. Any doubts he'd had about this situation really happening dissolved. 

 

So this was it, then.

 

Griffin sighed, ran a nervous hand through his hair, and leaned back in the seat. At least the sky-blue shade of the void around him was kind of nice. He half-wondered if the sky would change every time he slept. Maybe it'd cycle through every color in the spectrum and then start over again. He did have all the time in existence, after all.

 

He shook his head. No, he couldn't start thinking about that sort of shit, or he'd get panicky again. Couldn't get complacent with the situation. There had to be a way out--for fuck's sake, it was a program, they couldn't really go on infinitely, could they? Everything had an end to it. That's just how the universe worked. He had to figure out a way to find Nick and get the hell out of here. 

 

He wished he could stand up in the car, because that anxious energy was back to swirling around inside him. He wanted to pace around, maybe throw something. Just do something to make an impact on the stupid void. There was a deep _fear_ in him, he wasn't even sure what it was a fear OF other than the cosmic horror of the situation itself, but god was it there. 

 

Maybe this place amplified your emotions. Maybe he was just pissed off at the hand fate had dealt him. But he had to do _something_. So, he did something. He whipped his shoe off his foot and hurled it at the windshield in front of him.

 

For a second he expected it to just bounce off with no impact, like it would in a world that made any normal sense. But no. The shoe crunched into the glass with a cracking sound, fracturing the surface, and  then--

 

**[Instability detected]**

 

\--The shoe was impaled in the window, glass sealed around it as if it had been a part of the vehicle.

 

Well, that was weird. No weirder than any of the rest of it, though. Griffin leaned forward to inspect the surface of the glass around the shoe--it was as if it hadn't been damaged at all. It just happened to have a shoe in it. Goddamnit, now he'd lost a shoe, along with everything else. He tugged on it with his hand, saw that it moved a bit towards him, and gave it a powerful yank back towards the seat.

 

With a pop, the shoe detached itself from the window, and the glass suddenly sealed back to the way it had been a minute (time interval?) earlier.

 

The force of the pull snapped Griffin back into the seat and pushed it back a little bit, and for a second, Griffin caught sight of his own face in the rear view mirror, a peach and orange face silhouetted against the blue-gray void.

 

Wait. Orange?

 

Griffin grabbed the front mirror and twisted it towards him to see his face. There was a bright patch of orange spreading from his left ear down his cheek. He brought a hand up to touch it. It felt...plasticky? Like a traffic cone, or a road barrier, or...

 

_A dummy?_

 

Ohhhhhhhhhhh no. A tentative realization was dawning in his mind. _This. This better not be--_

 

And that's when the beam hit.


	2. 2.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We check up on Nick.

Nick had always sort-of...known how things were going to go down. He just hadn't believed it.

 

He'd gotten a sense of it before. Back on one of the times he'd visited the Gridmap without Griffin in his free time, just gone wandering in the unknown on a whim. He'd been messing around with physics, tossing things up in the air with gravity, the usual. He'd gotten out the old bus. And for a second, looking at its driver, he'd been _sure_ he'd seen a face. 

 

Looking back on it now, he definitely had.

 

Nothing could have really prepared him for it, though. One moment he and Griffin had been hurtling through spacetime in the core of the ocean, pursued by beings of unimaginable horror—that was strange and mysterious enough. But then, the next moment, Griffin had been gone, and the next moment the beam had hit, and then Nick was sitting in the driver’s seat of a school bus. And then Nick wasn't Nick. 

 

When it had happened, he’d felt like crap physically. Like he’d been taken apart bit by bit, piece by piece, frame by frame, and then shoved back together again. His eyes had seen static and spiraling vortexes before finally settling on seeing the steering wheel in front of him. He wondered afterward if he was the same person, the same _being_ as before the beam had hit. He knew the answer was no, but the wondering left a possibility.

 

It wasn't unheard of for people to get trapped in simulation programs. He'd heard of it happening before. Hell, it was probably in the terms and conditions for the programs, the ones no one read. People descending into a previously unknown plotline, discovering sentient program-entities, getting lost. But what he hadn't heard of was this...this transformation, of a player figure into one of the entities in-game. But that was undoubtably what had happened. If he still had his wrist device, he could've confirmed it. Nick Robinson had, evidently, become 1.0. 

 

He still wasn't sure what the rules of it were. (There were always rules to this sort of thing, after all.) It wasn't what he'd expected, though. He'd thought that it would be impossible for him to move, but he definitely could. He could get up out of his seat, tentatively on stiff legs, and walk around; he could talk, in an odd staticky-gravely voice; he could even walk a bit out of the vehicle if he wanted. But not too far. Too far would make his mind hurt and his eyes tire and fill with exhaustion suddenly, until he turned around and walked haltingly back to the bus again. That was definitely a rule.

 

Of course, there wasn't much outside the vehicle for him to look at, though. Wherever he was, it didn't have any landmarks. He would've thought it was the old GSP, if not for the fact that the signature grid was missing. It was just...White.

 

And he hadn’t encountered anyone, either, which was weird. He thought he would’ve run into someone by now. Or someTHING, at least. If he was out of the Time Ring, shouldn’t the Blob (he shuddered to think about it) be released as well?

 

But he hadn’t seen anyone or anything. By all accounts, he was alone.

 

He didn't have the control device anymore, so he couldn't spawn things. If only he'd still had that, he could've fixed everything. But he didn't, and now he was stuck. 

 

Nick wondered where Griffin was.

 

He wondered why people always talked about the lure of the unknown, the enticing quality of forbidden knowledge. Forbidden knowledge had just gotten him and Griffin a shit ton of hassle. And now that the universe had royally fucked him over, he realized that the unknown, in practice, really kind of sucked.

 

He was honestly surprised he hadn't started panicking yet. But there was something about it all that calmed him, in a way. If he really was alone, then nothing bad could get to him. Nick could just sit in his bus, in his shiny helmet, and be fine. For eternity, he supposed. What a weird thought. He didn't think too long about it because he knew it would freak him out.

 

It was like that for a while. Sitting, thinking. Pacing up and down the aisle of the bus. He dug out a five-subject Mead notebook and a pencil from a red Jansport backpack (he was always impressed by how this program replicated real-world brands) and wrote down everything that came into his head. Wrote down the makes and traits of cars he and Griffin had used in the past, tried to remember and document their experiments. There were always more notebooks in the bags when he reached in--maybe they were reloading. So he filled each one with diagrams of cannons, flight trajectories, pages of scribbled imitations of godtrash. Maybe they'd be useful if he figured out how to get out of here.

 

Sometimes he'd get bored and stare at himself in the dashboard mirror. Or what had become himself, anyway. He was still having some trouble reconciling the image of what he was used to looking like in this world with what he saw in front of him-- this rigid, robot-like figure in a shiny blue-visored helmet and white jumpsuit. Fuckin' Busto 1-point-0. It would've been funny if it hadn't been true.

 

He didn't seem to feel the need to eat or drink, although he did get tired and fall asleep in his chair sometimes. He was never sure for how long. Like the Time Ring, this place didn't seem to have any proper passage of temporal movement. Sometimes he'd crack open the Sun Chips bag and eat a few, though. It just felt like the thing to do.

 

It was all sort of monotonous, really. He just tried to keep his mind off the inevitable eternity of it all. If he was going to go crazy, he would rather it be later rather than now.

 

Then suddenly, things were interesting again.

 

Nick wasn't really sure what he had been doing at the time--looking under a seat for another notebook to write in? pacing the aisles again?--but suddenly he was Not there, and was instead in his seat, hands placed firmly on the wheel, eyes staring forward. And he wasn't in the blank place either. Instead, the bus was somewhere much more familiar. He could see the skyward-reaching loops and towers of the Gridmap laid out before him.

 

Nick tried to look around and get a sense of his surroundings,  but quickly realized that wasn't going to happen. He was frozen in place, like when the game would lock up and pause without his permission, except now there wasn't an easy way out of it. He was stuck.

 

That's when he heard it. The sound of an approaching engine.

 

He looked forward--the only direction he really could at the moment--and watched as a familiar white pick up truck drove into his field of view. As it came closer, he inhaled sharply in surprise.

 

That was him. That was Nick. And--

 

"GRIFFIN!" He tried to yell. But he was still frozen, and his voice sounded dull and trapped inside his helmet. "GRIFFIN! IT'S ME, NICK!!! HEY! GET ME OUT OF HERE!!" Griffin didn't acknowledge him, nor did the Nick-doppelgänger seated next to him in the truck. Nick realized his voice probably wasn't audible.

 

The truck approached the front of the bus, and Nick could hear muttering. The boys got out of the car, and Nick watched himself and Griffin walk towards the door of the bus. The other Nick hit something on his control device-- _he had a control device,_ Nick realized--and the doors opened.

 

"Whoaaaa! Hold on a second! Who is this man! This man shouldn't be driving a school bus," the other Nick said, laughing. And Griffin was laughing too, staring at the figure in the driver's seat of the bus. 

 

Nick was hit with a powerful sense of deja vu. Hadn't _he_ said that? Then he realized. _Oh my fucking god. It's a time loop. Fucking hell. That's me. That's me from before. And that's not Griffin, that's past-Griffin. The time ring literally WAS a time ring. Jesus Christ._

 

Past-Nick approached Current-Nick--Nick-1.0? N1ck?--with an inquisitive look. Griffin followed behind. 

 

"Can you move him?" Griffin piped up, in that questioning voice Nick-1.0 had heard hundreds of times before. "Are those all articulated points, or--"

 

He had his answer in a second, as Nick-1.0 saw the control device on Past-Nick's wrist light up his stiff frame with a multitude of little blue lights, and was helpless to do anything as Past-Nick jerked his shoulder to look at him.

 

"Uhhh, Griffin....Griffin, holy shit??"

 

Nick-1.0 knew Past-Nick couldn't possibly realize yet that he was looking into his own eyes. And yet the experience of staring himself in the face was surreal. Did Past-Nick have any idea what was coming? Could Nick-1.0 get it across to him? Probably not, as it was currently impossible for him to move himself. God, this was fucked up. Past-Nick was muttering to Past-Griffin again, trying to yank him out of the seat, and it took all he had to hold on and not be torn apart. He didn't want to know what that would do to him. As far as he knew, he was human, and he didn't think humans were capable of godtrashing in a school bus seat. Not without dying or going mad.

 

"We gotta get you outta here, buddy," said Griffin, and for a second Nick-1.0 felt hope flutter in his chest before remembering that he and his friend's past self had very different descriptions of what "here" meant. He sighed.

 

"I'm gonna pull him through the windshield," laughed Past-Nick, and jerked him forward again. _That's not going to work,_ thought Nick-1.0, and just as he thought, the bus was wrenched from its spot as Past-Nick tried to shake him out. Nick-1.0 gasped as his hands and the dashboard of the bus began to distort as they hurtled to the ground, and--

 

**[Instability detected]**

 

He was back in the seat, frozen again, hands on the wheel, and the bus was fine. 

 

_Whoa. So that's what happens when the program reloads._

 

From a scientific perspective, it was fascinating. Being able to see the manipulation of program-space from INSIDE the program was very interesting. But from a plain old Nick perspective, getting whipped around the map, distorted into a torn-up mess, and having cannons shot into his bus really sucked.

 

The lack of recognition in Griffin's--and Past-Nick's--eyes didn't make it all any better, either.

 

From within the helmet, Nick-1.0 sighed. It was going to be a long-ass eternity, wasn't it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey everyone! thank you so much for your positive reactions to this fic! im having a lot of fun writing it so i hope you guys like it!


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